Christopher Isherwood: A Personal memoir (10 page)

I am uncertain when exactly Denny Fouts met Christopher, but according to
Down There on a Visit
‘Paul’ met him in the autumn of 1940 at a Californian restaurant in the company of Connolly’s American wife who had come back to the USA with Denny. Christopher was very much intrigued with this already legendary male prostitute, and struck up a friendship with him - though it does not appear to have been sexual. Denny or ‘Paul’ showed an interest in Heard (‘Augustus Parr’) and persuaded Christopher to introduce them. Christopher never said much about Denny in his letters to me, probably because he was aware that I had met him in Paris just before the war, and had not taken to him. But we know from
My Guru and His Disciple
that Denny wanted to try the Yogi life of meditation and ritual, though a meeting between him and the Swami had been a disaster, and when Christopher moved into a new apartment in March 1941 he invited Denny to share it with him and join with him in an experiment of strict Yogi observances as if they were training to be ‘monks’. This lasted very well until in August Denny, who as a conscientious objector had been assigned for service in a forestry camp, got his summons and had to leave. The La Verne seminar had started by then.

After La Verne, Christopher spent some time with the Quakers, who had set up a programme at Haverford, just outside Philadelphia, the aim of which was to help German-speaking refugees to learn about the American way of life and way of teaching. Christopher seems to have found the experience bracing and satisfying, and plunged into all the activities, not only tutoring the inmates but also doing the physical work and household chores. He also made an especial friend of a young lecturer in Spanish, by the name of Rene Blanc-Roos, who was already a warm if critical admirer of his work. Christopher believed that Blanc-Roos had helped him to overcome his writing block, and dedicated
Prater Violet
to him. The hostel closed in July 1942, by 
which time Pearl Harbor had taken place and America had entered the war. As Christopher had taken out his first papers to become an American subject, he was liable to the draft. He had no difficulty in being registered for non-combatant duties, but
 
as the age limit for the draft was lowered soon after, he was never in fact called up.

In the period directly after La Verne and Haverford, he entered what he called the ‘movie-swamp’ again, though he had no more luck than before in furthering his ill-starred career as a script-writer. He began work on a Somerset Maugham story,
The Hour Before Dawn
, in which his main contribution was to give plausibility to a tribunal scene for conscientious objectors; but the film was never made. After that he did some work on a film version of Wilkie Collins’s
The Woman in White
, but nearly all his contribution had vanished in the screen version eventually used. He then worked on a script with Aldous Huxley about a faith-healer, to be called
Jacob’s Hands
, but none of the studios would touch it. They were amazed afterwards to discover that this was because the studios were afraid of alienating the medical establishment. Christopher was working with Warner Brothers during most of 1945, but again nothing reached the screen. During this time he frequently mixed with the stars of the movie world, Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin and his wife Oona, whom he met through Salka Viertel’s salon. Meanwhile ‘Vernon’ had come to California again, but the new relationship with Christopher did not last. However, during the latter half of 1945, a new personality entered his life and had considerable influence for some years. Bill Caskey was an outstanding photographer of much charm and wit, who had come from a background of Kentucky horse-people. His drawbacks were a violent temper and too great a fondness for hard liquor. Christopher was captivated and stimulated, and took him to live with him in an apartment over Salka Viertel’s garage in Mabery Road. He took him to South America, as companion and photographer, on the six months’ visit that produced
The Condor and the Cows
, in the winter of 1947-8.

Even well before the war was over, in writing to announce how his work was going, he showed how his thoughts were turning 
more and more towards his old friends in Europe and his old haunts.

The Gita translation is finished at last, and I believe not bad. I wonder what you will think of it. Now I can get to work on my own stuff, and really discover what it is I want to write.

I have to pick up the knitting where I dropped it: but maybe it will be another kind of sock. Anyhow, never believe Tony [Bower]* or anyone else who says I have stopped writing. I know that I’ll write to my dying day …. I seem to spend more and more of my time with you, and others who aren’t here; and there is a curiously satisfactory feeling of communication. I refuse to believe that the difference in the kind of lives we have been leading is really important, and I believe that when we meet we shall pick up the threads much more easily than we suppose. We seem to have moved apart and together again ….

And again, a few months later: ‘There are many people I often wonder about - dozens and dozens. I suppose they are all alive and intensely busy, somewhere. I suppose I shall even see some of them again one day, unbelievable as it seems. I shall certainly have to come to England for a while as soon as the war is over, to see my Mother, who is getting old, and make various arrangements. I dread the sadness of that visit … .’

___________________________________

* A friend of both Isherwood and Lehmann.

C
hristopher fell rather ill for part of the winter of 1945-6, and was in hospital for an operation. He had planned his visit to England for the summer of 1946, but it had to be postponed. It was not till January 1947 that he finally took off from New York for London via Gander and Shannon. He has left a very vivid account of this visit in an article for my ‘Coming to London’ series in the
London Magazine.
He begins by describing the air journey, and then goes on:

Throughout the years I had spent in Hollywood, I had never tired of protesting against the American film presentation of English life. What caricature! What gross exaggeration! But now - and increasingly during the weeks that followed - I began to reverse my judgement.
Is
it possible to exaggerate the Englishness of England? Even the bus which took us from the airport into London seemed grotesquely ‘in character’; one almost suspected that it had been expressly designed to amaze foreign visitors. By nature a single-decker, it had had a kind of greenhouse grafted insecurely on to its back. Riding in this was much more alarming than flying. We whizzed down narrow 
lanes with barely room enough to pass a pram, scraping with our sides the notorious English hedgerows; then slowed with a jerk to circle a roundabout - an
Alice in Wonderland
death trap guaranteed to wreck any driver doing more than five miles an hour. And then we would pass through an English village complete with a village church in a country churchyard; so absurdly authentic that it might have been lifted bodily off a movie-lot at MGM … . And as for the accents that I now began to hear around me - I could scarcely trust my ears.

Surely they were playing it
very
broad? Half the population appeared to be talking like Richard Haydn as a Cockney bank clerk, the other half like Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes.

I saw little of London that night, for I went straight to John Lehmann’s house
¹
; and there a welcome awaited me that I shall never forget. Looking around me at the faces of my old friends, I discovered a happy paradox - namely that, while England seemed fascinatingly strange, my friends and our friendship seemed to be essentially what they had always been, despite the long separation. That was what was to make my visit so wonderful and memorable.

Christopher had written to me from Santa Monica in December that ‘I’m a Yank now - but don’t be alarmed -you’d never know it.’ Perhaps he didn’t realize that his accent and some of his mannerisms had changed so much. We noticed at once. These changes did not, however, show themselves continuously: I had the impression, talking to him during the three months of his visit, that he was, in spirit, being pulled to and fro across the Atlantic all the time. His article went on:

During my re-exploration of London, I got two strong impressions; of shabbiness and of goodwill. The Londoners themselves were shabby - many of them stared longingly at my new overcoat - and their faces were still wartime faces, lined and tired. But they didn’t seem depressed or sullen. This may sound like a stupidly sweeping statement by a casual visitor, but I have seen a thoroughly depressed nation - the German in 1932. The English were not in the least like that. 
For instance, the girls at the ration board, which surely must have been the most exasperating of jobs, were quite gratuitously pleasant. ‘It seems so silly’, one of them remarked to me, ‘to have to call Americans
aliens
.’ And this wasn’t just a chance encounter with a solitary xenophile, for I heard another girl being extremely sympathetic to a native lady with an obviously unreasonable grievance. On another occasion, when I was on a train, a young couple sat next to me who were about to emigrate to Australia; their baggage, already labelled for the voyage, proclaimed this fact. The other passengers in my compartment congratulated the couple on their decision and questioned them eagerly about their plans - all this without the slightest hint of bitterness or criticism. Of course this goodwill was somewhat of the grin-and-bear-it variety, but it had certainly made London a much friendlier place to visit. The only negative aspect of it was, perhaps, that the English had become a little too docile in their attitude towards official regulations. ‘We’re a nation of queue-formers,’ someone said ….

London’s shabbiness was another matter; it didn’t seem to me to have a cheerful side. The actual bomb damage gave you a series of sudden shocks - as when, one evening, I spent some time ringing the doorbell of a house, until I happened to look up through the fanlight and saw that the place was an empty shell, smashed wide open to the stars. Yet the shabbiness was more powerfully and continuously depressing. Plaster was peeling from even the most fashionable squares and crescents; hardly a building was freshly painted. In the Reform Club, the wallpaper was hanging down in tatters. The walls of the National Gallery showed big unfaded rectangles, where pictures had been removed and not yet rehung. Many once stylish restaurants were now reduced to drabness and even squalor.

The shortage of materials made all but the most urgent repairs illegal …. London’s shabbiness was so sad, I thought, because it was unwilling - quite unlike the cheerful down-at-heel air of some minor Latin American capital. London remembered the past and was ashamed of its present appearance.

Christopher was excited, during those two days he spent with me, a little confused by the war-time changes he had already noticed, and a little nervous about the way he would be received.

We soon, I think, put him at his ease - as many of his old friends as could be mustered to meet him in person, and others who were on the telephone as soon as the news got round. None of us had joined the scapegoat chase in which politicians and journalists who had never known them (or most likely their works) had tried to vilify him and Auden as ‘escapers’. We had been sorry not to have him during the weird, sometimes apocalyptic and frightening experiences we had been through; we had been a little sceptical, while the bombs were falling, of his mystical exercises in Yoga temples and monasteries; we were immensely glad to have him back, even for so short a time as he planned to stay with us, even in this slightly transmogrified form. We noted that the face, deeply tanned by the Californian sun, was a little more lined; but that the deep-set eyes, though opened wide in respectful amazement or horror at the tales we had to tell, twinkled with the same old impish appreciation of anything comical or fantastic. We noted that his favourite talk was of Hollywood and movie-stars; and we wondered sometimes whether he didn’t in fact see us as characters in a film - an American film of little old England heroically carrying on in spite of all trials and tribulations.

After these all too brief days of happy reunion with his old friends and getting the feel of post-war London, Christopher went straight up North to see his mother and his brother Richard at the old family home of Wyberslegh Hall in Cheshire, which he found in a thoroughly run-down condition. ‘I was never meant for these latitudes,’ he cried in his first letter to me, ‘and I huddle miserably in front of a blue gas-fire. London seems almost as remote as America. If only we lived there still! I spend most of the time reading my old diaries (goodness what energy I had in those days! It’s a marvel I’m not impotent) and washing dishes. My mother hasn’t changed a bit. She does all the cooking. But Nanny is very, very old …_’ And in the next: ‘Being up here is like a steamship journey. You just screw down the porthole and weather it out. I have all my letters, photographs and books to amuse me. Turning over the pages of 
Evil Was Abroad l
wished so much you’d write another novel. Will you? Please … .’ Later on he went down to Cheltenham to stay with his old friends Olive Mangeot and Jean Ross. He tried to get over to Stratford to see Beatrix, who was playing an assortment of parts, including Viola, Portia, Isabella and the Nurse in 
Romeo and Juliet, 
but swirling floods cut them off from one another.

In his article for the ‘Coming to London’ series he tried to give an outsider’s impression of the rigours of that terrible winter:

Few of my readers will need to be reminded that this was the winter of the coal shortage and the great blizzards. The snow started a week after my arrival; and it soon assumed the aspect of an invading enemy. Soldiers turned out to fight it with flamethrowers. The newspapers spoke of it in quasi-military language: ‘Scotland isolated’, ‘England cut in half’. Even portions of London were captured; there was a night when no taxi driver would take you north of Regent’s Park. With coal strictly rationed, gas reduced to a blue ghost and electricity often cut off altogether, everybody in London was shivering. I remembered how the actors played to nearly empty houses, heroically stripped down to their indoor clothes, while we their audience huddled together in a tight clump, muffled to the chins in overcoats, sweaters and scarves. I remember a chic lunch party composed of the intellectual 
beau monde
, at which an animated discussion of existentialism was interrupted by one of the guests exclaiming piteously, ‘Oh, I’m so 
cold!
’  Two or three of my friends said to me then: ‘Believe us, this is worse than the war!’ By which I understood them to mean that the situation couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination be viewed as a challenge to self-sacrifice or an inspiration to patriotism; it was merely hell.